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Google Sued by 3 Female Ex-Employees Who Say It Pays Women Less Than Men

167 points by lmcnish14 9y ago

dogruck 9y ago
This is noise because these lawsuits are common, and Google has deep pockets. The more interesting investigation is what happens at small companies. For example, look at the early Google employees -- only a few women, and most of those women were not engineers. Once a company is at Google's size, comp levels and hiring become formulaic. Not to mention that Google is a monopoly, with enough excess cash to settle lawsuits, fire internal bloggers, and pay up underperformers to clean the stats.
- tyingq 9y ago
  >Once a company is at Google's size, comp levels and hiring become formulaic. It would be pretty difficult to make completely objective formulas for salary. I assume it maps back to perceived performance (in the interview, or after hiring), which is always biased, conscious or not.
  - dogruck 9y ago
    Ok, let's think about the compensation process. You start with the obvious -- managers assess the value of each employee. Roughly, for each employee you derive a dollar amount that is: 1. Larger than what the employee could be paid elsewhere (otherwise, the employee leaves) 2. Close to the employee's contribution to the company's bottom line. That's a rough science though. #2 is certainly harder than #1. So, next, you put all that data into a big database. Then you run a variety of sanity checks (aka formulas): 1. Large changes in comp, year over year 2. Discrepancies when broken out by factors including age and gender. Finally, you're faced with a choice. If you override all of your initial estimates with the formulas, then you have formulaic comp. Otherwise, you're at risk to lawsuits. Imagine a GOOG executive defending "yes, we paid women less because we honestly think, on average, the male employees contributed more to our bottom line." That's not gunna happen, which sorta leads to formulaic comp, no?
    - geofft 9y ago
      #1 directly reflects biases from other companies, which could arise for lots of reasons. If, say, many of your male engineers are getting offers from Uber and the rest aren't comfortable applying, and Uber is giving extremely high comp to lure people away from Google, then your formulaic comp will end up with men getting consistently higher salaries. Google is pretty opaque about how they make salary offers, but from reports on the internet plus my own experience and that of friends, it seems like they have rough comp bands within each level, and they don't really "negotiate" in the conventional sense, but they do have lots of leeway to match/exceed competing offers or your current salary if you name them before the initial offer. So if you have those offers on hand from other companies, or if you had a particularly strong current salary, you can get a much higher offer. Also, don't forget that this lawsuit is specifically alleging that they underlevel women, not that they're directly paying women less. There are lots of easier ways for an executive to defend that, e.g., "like everyone else in the industry we'd love to hire qualified women but it's a pipeline problem" etc. etc. (The executive might even genuinely believe it.)
      - dogruck 9y ago
        I agree with everything you said, and your experiences match my own. I still say that situation leads to formulaic, systematic management. Let's say that GOOG developed a sophisticated machine learning algorithm that made all hiring, firing, promotion, and compensation decisions. The code is open source, and everyone can see that it doesn't contain explicit logic for bias. Now, a short, 44 year old, male engineer sues because of a statistically significant observed bias against one of his cohorts. Is the program biased, or just insightful? With humans, it seems we have no choice but to assume their collective algo is biased. And it often is! But, when you're a massive monopoly with tons of cash, the safest thing is to make formulaic decisions that are statistically clean. It's just good business.
        geofft 9y ago
        This seems essentially like Searle's Chinese room. The program is not biased, in the sense that there is no line of code that adds bias, but the application of the program to the available data clearly produces a biased process. We've seen this exact thing with other machine learning algorithms - there was the one in the news recently that insisted on classifying a photo of a man in the kitchen as a woman, because all its training data firmly convinced it that women are the only people in the kitchen. I guess the thing worth explicitly asking is whether biases for entirely logical reasons are defensible - for instance, if you start with an industry where (for whatever reason) men are paid much more highly than women, it's okay to offer people their current salary + fixed delta to poach them from their jobs. I would say no, because the goal of legal policies like this is to achieve a specific result in society, and specifically not to punish bad people in charge of companies, so the question is not whether people had a bad motive, but whether the result is being achieved. If you're allowed to apply a non-biased algorithm to biased starting data and have it yield an equally-biased output, you're not actually solving the bias.
- skj 9y ago
  At Google, comp comes from how effective your management chain makes your case. It has a large subjective component.
  - dogruck 9y ago
    What happens when the large subjective components yield comp stats that indicate gender bias? And my original point was that there's much more bias at small companies.
geofft 9y ago
Has anything happened with the Department of Labor case recently? Last I heard, the specific organization that was pursuing the case was being defunded / split up by the current administration. It sounded like they had some interesting analysis of the data, and I don't think that's ever made it to a courtroom. I'm pretty unsurprised that leveling is a good way for bias to sneak in. My experience as a man applying for a Google position and also talking to women applying for Google positions is that leveling is extremely opaque, more so than the salary offer, and the same candidate could easily move between L3/L4 or L4/L5 essentially at the whims of the recruiter and the interviewers, and the same role can be filled by multiple levels (e.g. there isn't headcount that's open at L4 but not L5). And this would be consistent with both Google's claims that people of the same role and level are paid consistently, and employees' claims of pay discrepancy. Also, here's the original complaint: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4044053-Kelly-Ellis-Et-Al-v-Google-Inc-Complaint.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4044053-Kelly-Ellis-...
- chrisbroadfoot 9y ago
  It's rare you'd have headcount open at L4 but not L5. There's a significant jump between levels, but not to the extent you're saying. Leveling is a function of interviewer recommendations and hiring committee approving a candidate for a certain level. We usually interview people with a target range in mind (e.g., L4-L5) that's based on your experience and current role. Base salaries don't have a huge range until you get very senior (e.g. Director). There's a LOT more variance in stock grants. I'm sure there are people two levels below me that have a higher overall comp due to huge stock grants. Source: I work for Google, interview a lot, but don't serve on hiring committees. This isn't advice, and may not apply to all areas of the company.
- mpweiher 9y ago
  > Has anything happened with the Department of Labor case recently? Last I heard was the judge denying a request for more information, saying DoL was on a "fishing expedition" and didn't have anything to back their case and justify said fishing expedition.
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- deleted 9y ago
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manbearpigg 9y ago
Google asked for this. You reap what you sow.
- brad0 9y ago
  Would you be able to expand on this? I think the reason your comment is being downvoted is because you haven't backed up your opinion with anything.
CobrastanJorji 9y ago
> Ms. Ellis, who left the company in 2014, says that almost all of the female software engineers at Google worked in front-end jobs while men worked in back-end roles. That seems both highly dubious and easy to verify.
- Alex3917 9y ago
  Keep in mind that because of their scale, jobs that would be considered full stack or back end at other companies are probably considered front end at Google.
  - jpatokal 9y ago
    Edit: Nvm. Alex3917 defines it better than I did.
    - nrmitchi 9y ago
      Well, they sort of do, because those terms don't map so cleanly when you begin spreading into a multi-tiered architecture. You could easily end up with 'server side' work, which exists solely to augment or support a UI, and is not part of the 'core' business applications/services.
      - skj 9y ago
        You could, but at Google "frontend" work means things happening in the browser.
        brlewis 9y ago
        What about Android?
        Klockan 9y ago
        I worked in infrastructure and to us 'frontend' meant user-facing services while 'backend' are services that only other services are talking to.
dontnotice 9y ago
The media should practice more circumspection when reporting about lawyers seeking plaintiffs or suing for class action status or at least mention how it’s a money making endeavour for that lawyer/law firm. Many of these lawyers are vultures trying to capitalize on topical matters and they rely on this sort of coverage for free marketing, it’s as likely for this to be thrown out as it is for any other outcome, and the media should consider that before obliging with the reputational damage. Edit: not sure why I'm being downvoted, I don't think I've made any non factual or offensive statements.
- geofft 9y ago
  Of course class-action lawsuits are a money-making endeavor for law firms. We live in a capitalist society, where the way we make things happen is that we make them profitable. In particular, class-action lawsuits exist so that law firms can find it profitable to take on cases where there is a wrong to be righted, but any single individual isn't going to find the cost of going to court and paying a lawyer to be worthwhile. If you think that lawyers being motivated by money corrupts the legal system, well, I would agree and apparently so would Judge Richard Posner, who retired this week because he suddenly realized how unjust this all was. But, well, this is the system we have now.
  - srtjstjsj 9y ago
    Posner's an interesting case. He claims that he is sick of how the under-lawyered get mistreated in the courts, but he's been a consistent advocate of many legal theories to harm marginalized people and animals: he's anti-privacy for citizens, but pro-privacy for police, anti-souveillance but pro-surveillence-by-State, anti-animal-rights, anti-antitrust, in favor of a free market for selling children, opposed to equality of educational opportunity even though he doesn't believe in genetic racial intelligence and does believe that Black children are systematically oppressed, and even though he thinks copyright/patents go to far he believes hyperlinking and paraphrasing news should be illegal! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Posner#Judicial_career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Posner#Judicial_career
  - dontnotice 9y ago
brad0 9y ago
One of the women suing complained that a man was hired a level above her with the same years of experience. They both had four years experience. I joined one of the big 4 eight years into my career. Similar to her I was placed at an entry level position. When I started I saw that I had the same ability as people higher than me. I made sure that I displayed that ability to my peers and manager. And what do you know, I got promoted into a more suitable position. Hiring is broken, we all know this. Sometimes we might not get what we deserve. If we want more then you need to work for it. Plain and simple. Google can't win with its current culture. This is what happens when a company or group is too left leaning. You always get attacked by the very people you're trying to help.
- hrktb 9y ago
  > Hiring is broken, we all know this. Then what is your problem with them suing ? They go a different way than yours, but if it's broken in the first place why not ?
  - slavak 9y ago
    Well, the suit only has merit if hiring is broken in a way that unfairly disadvantages a protected class. (In this case, women.) I think the poster's point was that hiring is broken equally for everyone, which is inefficient but not illegal.
- nomel 9y ago
  > Sometimes we might not get what we deserve. Sometimes we deserve less than others. Gender/etc aside, some people are less talented/effective. Society seems to be afraid to say this, but not everyone is created equal upstairs. > They both had four years experience. Obviously, on the job years is almost entirely unrelated to pre-work experience, so this is just silly. I hope there's more to it. I'm curious how their resumes/accomplishments compare for those four years.
  - brad0 9y ago
    Thanks for making these points explicit. Years experience is not an indicator of seniority. I have two friends that graduated at different years. One has more than 10 years experience. The other has three years. 10 year guy has been working with jquery and HTML the whole time. He avoids any other problems or domains. Three year guy wants to work in every area possible. He actively pursues internships and work that provides a wide range of experiences and technical variety. Now who do you think is more valuable as an employee?
vcool07 9y ago
I'll be shocked if its true. I'm working in the tech industry for like 13 years now, I've never heard of anyone getting a lesser pay on account of gender (at-least here in India). What has gender got to do with knowledge is beyond me !
- craftyguy 9y ago
  India != USA I agree with you though, gender does not matter, and should not matter, when it comes to compensation.
- disordinary 9y ago
  As in lots of western countries we have a large amount of people form India in the Aotearoa (New Zealand) tech industry and quite a few in my workplace. We're in the middle of an election right now with one of the political parties campaigning on forcing companies to make what they pay public so that we can ensure that minorities are being paid the same as others. So, naturally the discussion turned to equal pay at work and one of the new Indian hires said that in India his boss told him that he didn't like hiring females and when he did he always paid them less as they were stupid and lazy! That is obviously horrendous. This isn't an attack on India, I've never worked in a workplace with gender bias as far as I've seen, but just because my experience is positive it doesn't mean that it's positive everywhere. There are good and bad workplaces in every country unfortunately and statistics back that assertion up. Because I've never experienced anything bad it doesn't mean that bad things don't happen.
- sumedh 9y ago
  > I've never heard of anyone getting a lesser pay on account of gender (at-least here in India) and so you can speak for all Indians? I have heard one of my Indian manager saying they dont prefer hiring single females who are not native to the city where they are hiring because once they get married the females would leave the city and so the company loses all that training/skills etc.
  - kamaal 9y ago
    The attrition in most IT firms in India has been around 13% on an average. It means they have to hire endlessly to merely survive, let alone grow. That argument you made I've heard many managers say in many situations. You can't blame them because they have a situation in their teams where if the team size is say 20. There are on average 5 people who are expected to slog till death, while the remaining chill. You also run into situations where the most laziest ask for never ending accommodations. Leaving office early, WFH, never showing up on a friday, onsite, unjustfiable hikes etc. There is an upper limit how much a few people can work to make up for others. Regarding that training part. The problem is in a country like ours(India) where merely getting a job can be a ticket out of poverty. Expecting companies to pour in several hundreds of crores to train people, all because they were bored at home so wanted some place to sit and while away time till marriage, and move on later is a national waste. Especially if you are taking resources for people who are more committed to using that training to do something for themselves and the company. Don't expect others to take your career and life seriously, if you yourself don't.
Gustomaximus 9y ago
> (women) hold only 20 percent of the company’s higher-paying engineering jobs. I believe women make up less than 20% of comsci graduates? So wouldn't this be about right then. Also I'm assuming women in comsci have lower workforce participation than men do (as in broader economy) so Google must be hiring women at a higher ratio than men from the available pool. I'm 100% in support of open workplaces for gender/race/politics/sexuality/dress and whatever 'work ability' irrelevant preferences. And cases like Susan Fowler are absolutely disgusting. I also feel a bunch of people increasing complain about their lack of success due to gender or race and are not willing to see they have a fair crack at their career but dont have the talent/drive etc and cant see this lack of ability in themselves.
- waqf 9y ago
  > dont have the talent/drive etc Don't have the talent/drive/connections/hustle/luck …. There are more possibilities than just sexism vs. meritocracy. Edit: hey downvoters, I'm talking about why a random given person of any gender may not be progressing in their career. Read the context.
- kevmo 9y ago
  What percentage of programmers at Google have compsci degrees? What's the split like within that subset?
  - osmala 9y ago
    What percentage of HIGH PAY ENGINEERING jobs in google have comp sci degrees, that's the true comparison. And then there is bigger issue here. It's really the obsession about percentages of women in X position. Here's another percentage what percentage of women and men didn't waste a thought on how they looked in their teenage years because they where so obsessed on how computers worked? I believe it is both very small and men are over represented there, and they are over represented in high paying computer jobs.
    - kamaal 9y ago
      >>Here's another percentage what percentage of women and men didn't waste a thought on how they looked in their teenage years because they where so obsessed on how computers worked? Most people are not in the job because they like create things or build things. They are there because they want a job and nothing more. And they want a job where (unit of money)/(unit of work) has a higher value. That means they have to either figure out a way to make more money or do less work, or both. Therefore the question of early interest or passion is meaningless to most people. So as far as they are concerned, it rarely matters how set of people of identity A got to it. They think regardless of that if set A got it, other sets should get it too. This also creates other problems. Set A is likely to do side projects, write programs and hacks out of personal interest. Other sets looking at job as a return/effort metric will likely see why they are expected to do anything all all apart from working 5 hrs a day between 9 - 5. The problem is merit is heavily at the side of A and other sets want the reward to not go with merit, but rather with participation itself.
notgood 9y ago
Poor 3 things were paid 80K instead of 100K; what and important and news-worthy tragedy; not like the millions of Americans that haven't get an important increase in their <30K salary in their lifetimes [1][2] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonhardt-income-inequality.html?mcubz=3 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonh... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/wage-chart-2014-6 http://www.businessinsider.com/wage-chart-2014-6
- econner 9y ago
  How does this point invalidate their issue? All you've done is brought up another problem. Now there are 2 problems.
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  - notgood 9y ago
    is not about invalidation, its about priorities; have you seen any articles in the front page about those millions of Americans? Me neither; but dozens about how someone somewhere is winning 10% more than other someone and that the gender was clearly the reason.
- skj 9y ago
  If you wouldn't mind, please send me $20k per year. It's nothing to complain about, after all.
  - notgood 9y ago
    Ok, give me a job that pays 80K and I will send you the 20K without complaining.
kamaal 9y ago
This might be true and I hope they win. But unfortunately everything that they say applies to men too. I wonder if this due to lack of negotiation skills. I have seen this problem being under compensation for the same skill and peer levels for men too. At work, In one case I discovered a colleague being paid almost 50% times higher than I was. In another case in only a casual lunch conversation I discovered a colleague at the same level having RSU's almost triple my entire compensation. I also discovered while I moved to US from India(I moved back for Visa expiry reasons) that some colleagues had even negotiated green cards through really acrobatic legal work. Promotions, foreign travel, bonuses etc. Over 10 years in this industry I have seen ability to program well, or even do bigger software work like build scalable and stable systems isn't worth two shoes in this industry. One must have the ability to be politically skillful, negotiate well, know how to be well connected up management and use that leverage to further your career in both money and positions. I've tried to learn this, and failed. Unfortunately this turns out to be not something you can RTFM and learn.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  We are all salesman - and a better salesman gets better results. As nerds we tend to discount, dismiss, overlook, whatever, salesmanship skills. But they still count big time. We sell ourselves all the time, like it or not. Might as well try to learn how to get better at it. All aspects of ourselves can be tweaked to better our salesmanship - grooming, dress, posture, getting our teeth fixed, tone of voice, words used, email protocol, etc., the list is endless. This all started with the book "Dress For Success" by Molloy who noted that businessmen wearing tan overcoats did better than those wearing black overcoats.
  - kamaal 9y ago
    What you have written is 100% true. Especially about the dress part. A while back I started wearing a shirt and pant to work. People, especially juniors do tend to take you a lot more seriously if you look formal and well dressed, compared to say showing up in denims and t-shirt. But the negotiation and sales part. That's the issue. Its not easy to get good at that.
stretchwithme 9y ago
Companies pay some employees more for pretty good reasons. I don't think they're thinking "Jim's a dude so we should pay him $50K more than Sally." No, they're paying somebody more because they don't want them to leave. And if they are paying you less than somebody else, it's probably partially because they don't think you are as much of a flight risk. And if Google is wrong about these decisions, I'd guess we'd see a lot more female engineers leaving Google to start their own companies. But is that what we see?
- feminist17 9y ago
  > Companies pay some employees more for pretty good reasons. I think you give companies too much credit. Those pretty good reasons are typically that that's how much they asked, it wasn't unreasonable, and they passed the interviews. People's salaries are all over the map for the same sorts of positions, and it's not just IT and development. But, even though it might not be a clearcut answer to whether there is discrimination or bias in salaries, it should be explored. Even data with a wide, overlapping range doesn't mean that the mean and median can't be compared and valid conclusions drawn about probable bias. Google seems to take bias seriously, and I think if it could be proven with adequate certainty that salaries were affected by the sex of the employee alone, they'd do something about it.
  - stretchwithme 9y ago
    I tend to think that successful companies tend to know what they are doing better than observers.
    - ajross 9y ago
      But the problem is "know what they are doing" can still be unfair. Consider: you're staffing up a company and need folks now. You've found two candidates who seem equally qualified and want to hire them. Both are asking for only a modest raise over their current salaries, but one happens to make 50% more than the other due to arbitrary reasons[1] having nothing to do with qualifications. What do you do? Realistically you give them both what they ask and pay them unfairly. Congratulations, you're now part of the problem. [1] Yeah, one is a dude.
johndoe90 9y ago
I wonder if their skills are on the same level as the men who were paid more. And I'm curious, did they ask every single man in Google how much they get paid? Probably, there are some men who make even less than they do (or did). Please don't consider me a sexist, but this kind of stuff is everywhere now and it's hard to tell whether it's a truth or not.
- pentae 9y ago
  This is ideological warfare, it has nothing to do with logic.
ransom1538 9y ago
Flat salaries may fix this? You basically join at the same bracket publicly. No performance bonuses and all salaries increases are directly based on years put in. Everyone joins with the same options across the board. For each male hired there must be a female hired. No roles. Everyone has the same title: "Engineer". Off sites are strictly prohibited. Is this what the lawyers want?
- sdrothrock 9y ago
  > No performance bonuses and all salaries increases are directly based on years put in. Everyone joins with the same options across the board. This is how Japan worked for a long while; now it's moving toward a more meritocratic approach with performance bonuses and raises because the fact of the matter is that it sucks for people who work hard to be paid the same as the guy who comes in 9-5 and does average work.
- umanwizard 9y ago
  Incidentally, this is not too different from how top-tier law firms work. For example: http://abovethelaw.com/2016/06/breaking-ny-to-180k-cravath-raises-associate-base-salaries/2/ http://abovethelaw.com/2016/06/breaking-ny-to-180k-cravath-r...
- thekashifmalik 9y ago
  Haha that'd be ridiculous! Imagine working all night and getting paid the same as someone who works half as much. That being said, salaries are not determined by how hard you work but rather how much the company needs you to stay.
  - Consultant32452 9y ago
    > Imagine working all night and getting paid the same as someone who works half as much. It's the socialist dream!
  - kamaal 9y ago
    >>Imagine working all night and getting paid the same as someone who works half as much. You don't. And that's where it will all begin to break down. Things as a whole will be mediocre.
danschumann 9y ago
Disagreeable personalities tend to get paid more. When a man is disagreeable, people usually get wide eyed, but then accept him as kind of abrasive, but lovable. Women are either less likely to be disagreeable personalities, or less liked when doing so. If women get paid less, why doesn't google hire only women to save money?
- unescape 9y ago
  Disagreeable people also tend to get fired more, in my experience. Perhaps it balances out, which would explain why there are still disagreeable people.
to_bpr 9y ago
What is the end goal here? Companies being forced to publish and formalize pay tiers? Can Google publish a report on non-pay differences by sex at Google? Sick (or personal) leave taken, overtime worked, vacation time availed of, etc. by sex? Obviously with everyone being equal and doing equal jobs, the above shouldn't really be an issue?
- stale2002 9y ago
  The end goal is a meritocracy where women arent discriminated against, and are paid what they are worth. The current situation is not a meritocracy and it needs to be fixed.
  - romanovcode 9y ago
    In capitalism you are already payed what you are worth. If you agree for a shit salary that is your problem.
    - stale2002 9y ago
      Actually, if a company is illegally discriminating against people based on gender, then it is THEIR problem. If they do that then they can enjoy their millions of dollars in fines for doing something clearly illegal.
      - romanovcode 9y ago
        Person A asks for 90 dollars per year; Person B asks for 100 dollars per year. Person A does not ask for a rise after one year; Person B asks for 10 dollar rise after one year. TBH I don't see how it is a company fault.
        stale2002 9y ago
        They are at fault because they are systematically underpaying women of equal qualifications. It does not matter what the "reason" is. It does not matter if the bias is because equally skilled women merely ask for raises less often. If for any reason at all, you are systematically underpaying certain groups that are equally qualified and equally productive, you are legally liable and the onus is on you to fix it.
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Clubber 9y ago
Ladies, please, never take the first offer. My wife did that (she's also a programmer) and she's getting paid shit salary by a shit company to get shit on all day. From Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In "But what's interesting," she says, "was that when my brother-in-law and my husband were saying 'negotiate, negotiate, negotiate' – when I finally said OK I'll do it, because no man would take the first offer, I then thought to myself, I felt like I needed a justification for doing it. And it turns out that's what the data says: men can negotiate without apology or justification. It's expected. If women negotiate, they need to justify it. It can't be that you want more for you. Because that's what men get to do." As she writes in the book, "success and likability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women." https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2013/mar/15/facebook-sheryl-sandberg-lean-in https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2013/mar/15/facebook...
- rootlocus 9y ago
  On a related note, my company raises salaries yearly as a percentage of the current salary. Even though those with lower salaries get a slightly larger percentage, everyone gets somewhere between 8% to 15%. Having a higher initial offer and asking for a higher raise (and arguing that you earned it) results in better raises. Nobody expects everyone to get the same salary.
snambi 9y ago
Really?
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lumberingjack 9y ago
I still wonder why the gender equality issue in nursing has not been addressed we need more men as nurses! What is it like 12 women to 1 men nurse we have to fix this its is out of hand. /s
- tptacek 9y ago
  Hahahaha it's funny because "nursing" is a gendered term for a class of front-line medical occupation that is almost certain to be vital to the provisioning of cost-effective health care in the 21st century where it is vitally important that we both raise the status of the profession to get more people into the labor force to do it and also to raise its status among consumers so less people have to wait for ludicrously expensive general practitioner doctors when a qualified nurse-practitioner will do and that's totally what you meant, right? The best joke!
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  - broodbucket 9y ago
    Because one of the several definitions of "nursing" is gendered does not mean it is a "gendered term", especially when used in a non-gendered context. Unless I'm immune to the irony, this looks like a ridiculous out of place outburst.
    - ihm 9y ago
      You don't think that people are accustomed to thinking of "nurse" as a female role?
      - broodbucket 9y ago
        Sure but I don't think a mother breastfeeding their child being called "nursing" is the reason
        9y ago
the_evacuator 9y ago
These ladies are behind the times. Gender politics at Google are now so advanced that feminism isn't even a thing. The "non-binary" and "genderqueer" have thrown the feminists under the bus. Frankly I'm shocked that the informal voluntary salary survey had the bad taste to try to classify gender.
unescape 9y ago
Somebody at Google could write a memo proposing that sexism might not be the only possible explanation of why a majority of their top engineers are male.
bandrami 9y ago
The fun part of these articles is reading all the comments that literally post proximate causes for the gender wage gap and somehow conclude from that that the gap (which they just validated) does not exist. This whole process infuriates me. The gender wage gap is an empirical question. It exists. If we believe it's a problem (I do; you may not), it has the easiest solution in the world: give women more money. Seriously, I just solved the gender pay gap, right there: give women more money. There's all kind of ways you could do that (wage mandates, tax credits, etc.) and they all have pros and cons, but searching for proximate and ultimate causes here is kind of stupid. It exists; if you think it's a problem, the solution is breathtakingly obvious.
- great_psy 9y ago
  I don't understand how just giving a group of people more money will solve the problem. That's is an artificial way of addressing it, it's just a band aid. Let's look at the causes , and address those. I think that's how you solve it. It is pretty sexist to say , "give someone more money because they are a women"
  - bandrami 9y ago
    Ummm... you realize band-aids solve the problem of bleeding, right? Similarly, giving women more money solves the problem of women getting paid less money.
    - solotronics 9y ago
      why isn't everyone paid exactly the same? because that would suck for all of us here and be great for everyone that doesn't work as hard. I was messing with strange *nix distros for years and teaching myself programming before I got a tech job. I would be seriously pissed if someone that didn't know as much got my same job and pay just because they were a _____
      - bandrami 9y ago
        I could understand getting mad if your pay was lowered, but how are you harmed if the other person's pay is increased? We make all sorts of incredibly bizarre (from an outside perspective) decisions about who gets paid what; the fact that we've fooled ourselves into thinking that it's because of supply and demand curves may be comforting but is completely unfounded in any data.
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AlexCoventry 9y ago
I don't know much about civil suits... Is the complaint a matter of public record already? Would be interesting reading.
eksemplar 9y ago
There is an empirically proven wage gap, yet almost every comment to this article is people conjuring up social constructs to explain how that is perfectly fair. It's not fair though, that's the entire point of the inequality in the wage gap. What I do t understand is why people so fiercely defend this wage gap. If women were paid equal to men, we would have lost nothing.
mirimir 9y ago
I gather that Google has pay grades. But are they reviewed in periodic performance reviews? And to what extent is salary synced to that negotiated at hire? I mean, if women (as I've read) generally don't negotiate on salary as hard as men do, are they indefinitely paid proportionately less?
ManlyBread 9y ago
Google has put substantial effort into making the workplace "better" for women (at least in comparison with other companies) and somehow it is still not enough. I can't help but wonder if "enough" even exists - if a company makes an effort to hire the female workforce, promote women programmers and gets rid of anyone who can make women feel uncomfortable then what else still needs to be done? The lawsuit is not even about getting less money for the same amount of work, it's about statistics and averages!
j7ake 9y ago
A purely capitalist solution would be to fire all the men and keep only the women because they are doing comparable work for less pay. In a capitalist market why hasn't this happened already ? This is exactly what happened when much of manufacturing moved away from USA to china, but for some reason this has not happened in the male female salary disparity. A company can earn diversiy points and save money by not hiring expensive male engineers.
- romanovcode 9y ago
  Someone tried this already, didn't go as well as planned. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1168182/Catfights-handbags-tears-toilets-When-producer-launched-women-TV-company-thought-shed-kissed-goodbye-conflict-.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1168182/Catfights-...
  - bb611 9y ago
    At best a story about someone running a company with no idea of how to hire or manage for culture fit, at worst a fiction made to bring in some cash from the daily mail, a publication generally known for their lack of journalistic depth.
mutatedspleen 9y ago
I guarantee they will write a book after all of this. Their story, their raw emotion, the disparity, diversity and oh my the adversity; all beautifully painted on a backdrop of capitalization and autism. Wake me up when it's time. I'll be here, crying.
userpass 9y ago
The solution is obvious. Lock down all computers and only allow computer science students and licensed graduates write code. Don't let those "nerdy" boys use an unfair advantage to get ahead of the others! Downvote as you wish.
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167 points by lmcnish14 9y ago

This is noise because these lawsuits are common, and Google has deep pockets. The more interesting investigation is what happens at small companies. For example, look at the early Google employees -- only a few women, and most of those women were not engineers. Once a company is at Google's size, comp levels and hiring become formulaic. Not to mention that Google is a monopoly, with enough excess cash to settle lawsuits, fire internal bloggers, and pay up underperformers to clean the stats.

tyingq 9y ago
>Once a company is at Google's size, comp levels and hiring become formulaic. It would be pretty difficult to make completely objective formulas for salary. I assume it maps back to perceived performance (in the interview, or after hiring), which is always biased, conscious or not.
- dogruck 9y ago
  Ok, let's think about the compensation process. You start with the obvious -- managers assess the value of each employee. Roughly, for each employee you derive a dollar amount that is: 1. Larger than what the employee could be paid elsewhere (otherwise, the employee leaves) 2. Close to the employee's contribution to the company's bottom line. That's a rough science though. #2 is certainly harder than #1. So, next, you put all that data into a big database. Then you run a variety of sanity checks (aka formulas): 1. Large changes in comp, year over year 2. Discrepancies when broken out by factors including age and gender. Finally, you're faced with a choice. If you override all of your initial estimates with the formulas, then you have formulaic comp. Otherwise, you're at risk to lawsuits. Imagine a GOOG executive defending "yes, we paid women less because we honestly think, on average, the male employees contributed more to our bottom line." That's not gunna happen, which sorta leads to formulaic comp, no?
  - geofft 9y ago
    #1 directly reflects biases from other companies, which could arise for lots of reasons. If, say, many of your male engineers are getting offers from Uber and the rest aren't comfortable applying, and Uber is giving extremely high comp to lure people away from Google, then your formulaic comp will end up with men getting consistently higher salaries. Google is pretty opaque about how they make salary offers, but from reports on the internet plus my own experience and that of friends, it seems like they have rough comp bands within each level, and they don't really "negotiate" in the conventional sense, but they do have lots of leeway to match/exceed competing offers or your current salary if you name them before the initial offer. So if you have those offers on hand from other companies, or if you had a particularly strong current salary, you can get a much higher offer. Also, don't forget that this lawsuit is specifically alleging that they underlevel women, not that they're directly paying women less. There are lots of easier ways for an executive to defend that, e.g., "like everyone else in the industry we'd love to hire qualified women but it's a pipeline problem" etc. etc. (The executive might even genuinely believe it.)
    - dogruck 9y ago
      I agree with everything you said, and your experiences match my own. I still say that situation leads to formulaic, systematic management. Let's say that GOOG developed a sophisticated machine learning algorithm that made all hiring, firing, promotion, and compensation decisions. The code is open source, and everyone can see that it doesn't contain explicit logic for bias. Now, a short, 44 year old, male engineer sues because of a statistically significant observed bias against one of his cohorts. Is the program biased, or just insightful? With humans, it seems we have no choice but to assume their collective algo is biased. And it often is! But, when you're a massive monopoly with tons of cash, the safest thing is to make formulaic decisions that are statistically clean. It's just good business.
      - geofft 9y ago
        This seems essentially like Searle's Chinese room. The program is not biased, in the sense that there is no line of code that adds bias, but the application of the program to the available data clearly produces a biased process. We've seen this exact thing with other machine learning algorithms - there was the one in the news recently that insisted on classifying a photo of a man in the kitchen as a woman, because all its training data firmly convinced it that women are the only people in the kitchen. I guess the thing worth explicitly asking is whether biases for entirely logical reasons are defensible - for instance, if you start with an industry where (for whatever reason) men are paid much more highly than women, it's okay to offer people their current salary + fixed delta to poach them from their jobs. I would say no, because the goal of legal policies like this is to achieve a specific result in society, and specifically not to punish bad people in charge of companies, so the question is not whether people had a bad motive, but whether the result is being achieved. If you're allowed to apply a non-biased algorithm to biased starting data and have it yield an equally-biased output, you're not actually solving the bias.
skj 9y ago
At Google, comp comes from how effective your management chain makes your case. It has a large subjective component.
- dogruck 9y ago
  What happens when the large subjective components yield comp stats that indicate gender bias? And my original point was that there's much more bias at small companies.

geofft 9y ago

Has anything happened with the Department of Labor case recently? Last I heard, the specific organization that was pursuing the case was being defunded / split up by the current administration. It sounded like they had some interesting analysis of the data, and I don't think that's ever made it to a courtroom. I'm pretty unsurprised that leveling is a good way for bias to sneak in. My experience as a man applying for a Google position and also talking to women applying for Google positions is that leveling is extremely opaque, more so than the salary offer, and the same candidate could easily move between L3/L4 or L4/L5 essentially at the whims of the recruiter and the interviewers, and the same role can be filled by multiple levels (e.g. there isn't headcount that's open at L4 but not L5). And this would be consistent with both Google's claims that people of the same role and level are paid consistently, and employees' claims of pay discrepancy. Also, here's the original complaint: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4044053-Kelly-Ellis-Et-Al-v-Google-Inc-Complaint.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4044053-Kelly-Ellis-...

chrisbroadfoot 9y ago
It's rare you'd have headcount open at L4 but not L5. There's a significant jump between levels, but not to the extent you're saying. Leveling is a function of interviewer recommendations and hiring committee approving a candidate for a certain level. We usually interview people with a target range in mind (e.g., L4-L5) that's based on your experience and current role. Base salaries don't have a huge range until you get very senior (e.g. Director). There's a LOT more variance in stock grants. I'm sure there are people two levels below me that have a higher overall comp due to huge stock grants. Source: I work for Google, interview a lot, but don't serve on hiring committees. This isn't advice, and may not apply to all areas of the company.
mpweiher 9y ago
> Has anything happened with the Department of Labor case recently? Last I heard was the judge denying a request for more information, saying DoL was on a "fishing expedition" and didn't have anything to back their case and justify said fishing expedition.
- 9y ago

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manbearpigg 9y ago

Google asked for this. You reap what you sow.

brad0 9y ago
Would you be able to expand on this? I think the reason your comment is being downvoted is because you haven't backed up your opinion with anything.

CobrastanJorji 9y ago

> Ms. Ellis, who left the company in 2014, says that almost all of the female software engineers at Google worked in front-end jobs while men worked in back-end roles. That seems both highly dubious and easy to verify.

Alex3917 9y ago
Keep in mind that because of their scale, jobs that would be considered full stack or back end at other companies are probably considered front end at Google.
- jpatokal 9y ago
  Edit: Nvm. Alex3917 defines it better than I did.
  - nrmitchi 9y ago
    Well, they sort of do, because those terms don't map so cleanly when you begin spreading into a multi-tiered architecture. You could easily end up with 'server side' work, which exists solely to augment or support a UI, and is not part of the 'core' business applications/services.
    - skj 9y ago
      You could, but at Google "frontend" work means things happening in the browser.
      - brlewis 9y ago
        What about Android?
      - Klockan 9y ago
        I worked in infrastructure and to us 'frontend' meant user-facing services while 'backend' are services that only other services are talking to.

dontnotice 9y ago

The media should practice more circumspection when reporting about lawyers seeking plaintiffs or suing for class action status or at least mention how it’s a money making endeavour for that lawyer/law firm. Many of these lawyers are vultures trying to capitalize on topical matters and they rely on this sort of coverage for free marketing, it’s as likely for this to be thrown out as it is for any other outcome, and the media should consider that before obliging with the reputational damage. Edit: not sure why I'm being downvoted, I don't think I've made any non factual or offensive statements.

geofft 9y ago
Of course class-action lawsuits are a money-making endeavor for law firms. We live in a capitalist society, where the way we make things happen is that we make them profitable. In particular, class-action lawsuits exist so that law firms can find it profitable to take on cases where there is a wrong to be righted, but any single individual isn't going to find the cost of going to court and paying a lawyer to be worthwhile. If you think that lawyers being motivated by money corrupts the legal system, well, I would agree and apparently so would Judge Richard Posner, who retired this week because he suddenly realized how unjust this all was. But, well, this is the system we have now.
- srtjstjsj 9y ago
  Posner's an interesting case. He claims that he is sick of how the under-lawyered get mistreated in the courts, but he's been a consistent advocate of many legal theories to harm marginalized people and animals: he's anti-privacy for citizens, but pro-privacy for police, anti-souveillance but pro-surveillence-by-State, anti-animal-rights, anti-antitrust, in favor of a free market for selling children, opposed to equality of educational opportunity even though he doesn't believe in genetic racial intelligence and does believe that Black children are systematically oppressed, and even though he thinks copyright/patents go to far he believes hyperlinking and paraphrasing news should be illegal! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Posner#Judicial_career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Posner#Judicial_career
- dontnotice 9y ago

brad0 9y ago

One of the women suing complained that a man was hired a level above her with the same years of experience. They both had four years experience. I joined one of the big 4 eight years into my career. Similar to her I was placed at an entry level position. When I started I saw that I had the same ability as people higher than me. I made sure that I displayed that ability to my peers and manager. And what do you know, I got promoted into a more suitable position. Hiring is broken, we all know this. Sometimes we might not get what we deserve. If we want more then you need to work for it. Plain and simple. Google can't win with its current culture. This is what happens when a company or group is too left leaning. You always get attacked by the very people you're trying to help.

hrktb 9y ago
> Hiring is broken, we all know this. Then what is your problem with them suing ? They go a different way than yours, but if it's broken in the first place why not ?
- slavak 9y ago
  Well, the suit only has merit if hiring is broken in a way that unfairly disadvantages a protected class. (In this case, women.) I think the poster's point was that hiring is broken equally for everyone, which is inefficient but not illegal.
nomel 9y ago
> Sometimes we might not get what we deserve. Sometimes we deserve less than others. Gender/etc aside, some people are less talented/effective. Society seems to be afraid to say this, but not everyone is created equal upstairs. > They both had four years experience. Obviously, on the job years is almost entirely unrelated to pre-work experience, so this is just silly. I hope there's more to it. I'm curious how their resumes/accomplishments compare for those four years.
- brad0 9y ago
  Thanks for making these points explicit. Years experience is not an indicator of seniority. I have two friends that graduated at different years. One has more than 10 years experience. The other has three years. 10 year guy has been working with jquery and HTML the whole time. He avoids any other problems or domains. Three year guy wants to work in every area possible. He actively pursues internships and work that provides a wide range of experiences and technical variety. Now who do you think is more valuable as an employee?

vcool07 9y ago

I'll be shocked if its true. I'm working in the tech industry for like 13 years now, I've never heard of anyone getting a lesser pay on account of gender (at-least here in India). What has gender got to do with knowledge is beyond me !

craftyguy 9y ago
India != USA I agree with you though, gender does not matter, and should not matter, when it comes to compensation.
disordinary 9y ago
As in lots of western countries we have a large amount of people form India in the Aotearoa (New Zealand) tech industry and quite a few in my workplace. We're in the middle of an election right now with one of the political parties campaigning on forcing companies to make what they pay public so that we can ensure that minorities are being paid the same as others. So, naturally the discussion turned to equal pay at work and one of the new Indian hires said that in India his boss told him that he didn't like hiring females and when he did he always paid them less as they were stupid and lazy! That is obviously horrendous. This isn't an attack on India, I've never worked in a workplace with gender bias as far as I've seen, but just because my experience is positive it doesn't mean that it's positive everywhere. There are good and bad workplaces in every country unfortunately and statistics back that assertion up. Because I've never experienced anything bad it doesn't mean that bad things don't happen.
sumedh 9y ago
> I've never heard of anyone getting a lesser pay on account of gender (at-least here in India) and so you can speak for all Indians? I have heard one of my Indian manager saying they dont prefer hiring single females who are not native to the city where they are hiring because once they get married the females would leave the city and so the company loses all that training/skills etc.
- kamaal 9y ago
  The attrition in most IT firms in India has been around 13% on an average. It means they have to hire endlessly to merely survive, let alone grow. That argument you made I've heard many managers say in many situations. You can't blame them because they have a situation in their teams where if the team size is say 20. There are on average 5 people who are expected to slog till death, while the remaining chill. You also run into situations where the most laziest ask for never ending accommodations. Leaving office early, WFH, never showing up on a friday, onsite, unjustfiable hikes etc. There is an upper limit how much a few people can work to make up for others. Regarding that training part. The problem is in a country like ours(India) where merely getting a job can be a ticket out of poverty. Expecting companies to pour in several hundreds of crores to train people, all because they were bored at home so wanted some place to sit and while away time till marriage, and move on later is a national waste. Especially if you are taking resources for people who are more committed to using that training to do something for themselves and the company. Don't expect others to take your career and life seriously, if you yourself don't.

Gustomaximus 9y ago

> (women) hold only 20 percent of the company’s higher-paying engineering jobs. I believe women make up less than 20% of comsci graduates? So wouldn't this be about right then. Also I'm assuming women in comsci have lower workforce participation than men do (as in broader economy) so Google must be hiring women at a higher ratio than men from the available pool. I'm 100% in support of open workplaces for gender/race/politics/sexuality/dress and whatever 'work ability' irrelevant preferences. And cases like Susan Fowler are absolutely disgusting. I also feel a bunch of people increasing complain about their lack of success due to gender or race and are not willing to see they have a fair crack at their career but dont have the talent/drive etc and cant see this lack of ability in themselves.

waqf 9y ago
> dont have the talent/drive etc Don't have the talent/drive/connections/hustle/luck …. There are more possibilities than just sexism vs. meritocracy. Edit: hey downvoters, I'm talking about why a random given person of any gender may not be progressing in their career. Read the context.
kevmo 9y ago
What percentage of programmers at Google have compsci degrees? What's the split like within that subset?
- osmala 9y ago
  What percentage of HIGH PAY ENGINEERING jobs in google have comp sci degrees, that's the true comparison. And then there is bigger issue here. It's really the obsession about percentages of women in X position. Here's another percentage what percentage of women and men didn't waste a thought on how they looked in their teenage years because they where so obsessed on how computers worked? I believe it is both very small and men are over represented there, and they are over represented in high paying computer jobs.
  - kamaal 9y ago
    >>Here's another percentage what percentage of women and men didn't waste a thought on how they looked in their teenage years because they where so obsessed on how computers worked? Most people are not in the job because they like create things or build things. They are there because they want a job and nothing more. And they want a job where (unit of money)/(unit of work) has a higher value. That means they have to either figure out a way to make more money or do less work, or both. Therefore the question of early interest or passion is meaningless to most people. So as far as they are concerned, it rarely matters how set of people of identity A got to it. They think regardless of that if set A got it, other sets should get it too. This also creates other problems. Set A is likely to do side projects, write programs and hacks out of personal interest. Other sets looking at job as a return/effort metric will likely see why they are expected to do anything all all apart from working 5 hrs a day between 9 - 5. The problem is merit is heavily at the side of A and other sets want the reward to not go with merit, but rather with participation itself.

notgood 9y ago

Poor 3 things were paid 80K instead of 100K; what and important and news-worthy tragedy; not like the millions of Americans that haven't get an important increase in their <30K salary in their lifetimes [1][2] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonhardt-income-inequality.html?mcubz=3 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonh... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/wage-chart-2014-6 http://www.businessinsider.com/wage-chart-2014-6

econner 9y ago
How does this point invalidate their issue? All you've done is brought up another problem. Now there are 2 problems.
- deleted 9y ago
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- notgood 9y ago
  is not about invalidation, its about priorities; have you seen any articles in the front page about those millions of Americans? Me neither; but dozens about how someone somewhere is winning 10% more than other someone and that the gender was clearly the reason.
skj 9y ago
If you wouldn't mind, please send me $20k per year. It's nothing to complain about, after all.
- notgood 9y ago
  Ok, give me a job that pays 80K and I will send you the 20K without complaining.

kamaal 9y ago

This might be true and I hope they win. But unfortunately everything that they say applies to men too. I wonder if this due to lack of negotiation skills. I have seen this problem being under compensation for the same skill and peer levels for men too. At work, In one case I discovered a colleague being paid almost 50% times higher than I was. In another case in only a casual lunch conversation I discovered a colleague at the same level having RSU's almost triple my entire compensation. I also discovered while I moved to US from India(I moved back for Visa expiry reasons) that some colleagues had even negotiated green cards through really acrobatic legal work. Promotions, foreign travel, bonuses etc. Over 10 years in this industry I have seen ability to program well, or even do bigger software work like build scalable and stable systems isn't worth two shoes in this industry. One must have the ability to be politically skillful, negotiate well, know how to be well connected up management and use that leverage to further your career in both money and positions. I've tried to learn this, and failed. Unfortunately this turns out to be not something you can RTFM and learn.

WalterBright 9y ago
We are all salesman - and a better salesman gets better results. As nerds we tend to discount, dismiss, overlook, whatever, salesmanship skills. But they still count big time. We sell ourselves all the time, like it or not. Might as well try to learn how to get better at it. All aspects of ourselves can be tweaked to better our salesmanship - grooming, dress, posture, getting our teeth fixed, tone of voice, words used, email protocol, etc., the list is endless. This all started with the book "Dress For Success" by Molloy who noted that businessmen wearing tan overcoats did better than those wearing black overcoats.
- kamaal 9y ago
  What you have written is 100% true. Especially about the dress part. A while back I started wearing a shirt and pant to work. People, especially juniors do tend to take you a lot more seriously if you look formal and well dressed, compared to say showing up in denims and t-shirt. But the negotiation and sales part. That's the issue. Its not easy to get good at that.

stretchwithme 9y ago

Companies pay some employees more for pretty good reasons. I don't think they're thinking "Jim's a dude so we should pay him $50K more than Sally." No, they're paying somebody more because they don't want them to leave. And if they are paying you less than somebody else, it's probably partially because they don't think you are as much of a flight risk. And if Google is wrong about these decisions, I'd guess we'd see a lot more female engineers leaving Google to start their own companies. But is that what we see?

feminist17 9y ago
> Companies pay some employees more for pretty good reasons. I think you give companies too much credit. Those pretty good reasons are typically that that's how much they asked, it wasn't unreasonable, and they passed the interviews. People's salaries are all over the map for the same sorts of positions, and it's not just IT and development. But, even though it might not be a clearcut answer to whether there is discrimination or bias in salaries, it should be explored. Even data with a wide, overlapping range doesn't mean that the mean and median can't be compared and valid conclusions drawn about probable bias. Google seems to take bias seriously, and I think if it could be proven with adequate certainty that salaries were affected by the sex of the employee alone, they'd do something about it.
- stretchwithme 9y ago
  I tend to think that successful companies tend to know what they are doing better than observers.
  - ajross 9y ago
    But the problem is "know what they are doing" can still be unfair. Consider: you're staffing up a company and need folks now. You've found two candidates who seem equally qualified and want to hire them. Both are asking for only a modest raise over their current salaries, but one happens to make 50% more than the other due to arbitrary reasons[1] having nothing to do with qualifications. What do you do? Realistically you give them both what they ask and pay them unfairly. Congratulations, you're now part of the problem. [1] Yeah, one is a dude.

johndoe90 9y ago

I wonder if their skills are on the same level as the men who were paid more. And I'm curious, did they ask every single man in Google how much they get paid? Probably, there are some men who make even less than they do (or did). Please don't consider me a sexist, but this kind of stuff is everywhere now and it's hard to tell whether it's a truth or not.

pentae 9y ago
This is ideological warfare, it has nothing to do with logic.

ransom1538 9y ago

Flat salaries may fix this? You basically join at the same bracket publicly. No performance bonuses and all salaries increases are directly based on years put in. Everyone joins with the same options across the board. For each male hired there must be a female hired. No roles. Everyone has the same title: "Engineer". Off sites are strictly prohibited. Is this what the lawyers want?

sdrothrock 9y ago
> No performance bonuses and all salaries increases are directly based on years put in. Everyone joins with the same options across the board. This is how Japan worked for a long while; now it's moving toward a more meritocratic approach with performance bonuses and raises because the fact of the matter is that it sucks for people who work hard to be paid the same as the guy who comes in 9-5 and does average work.
umanwizard 9y ago
Incidentally, this is not too different from how top-tier law firms work. For example: http://abovethelaw.com/2016/06/breaking-ny-to-180k-cravath-raises-associate-base-salaries/2/ http://abovethelaw.com/2016/06/breaking-ny-to-180k-cravath-r...
thekashifmalik 9y ago
Haha that'd be ridiculous! Imagine working all night and getting paid the same as someone who works half as much. That being said, salaries are not determined by how hard you work but rather how much the company needs you to stay.
- Consultant32452 9y ago
  > Imagine working all night and getting paid the same as someone who works half as much. It's the socialist dream!
- kamaal 9y ago
  >>Imagine working all night and getting paid the same as someone who works half as much. You don't. And that's where it will all begin to break down. Things as a whole will be mediocre.

danschumann 9y ago

Disagreeable personalities tend to get paid more. When a man is disagreeable, people usually get wide eyed, but then accept him as kind of abrasive, but lovable. Women are either less likely to be disagreeable personalities, or less liked when doing so. If women get paid less, why doesn't google hire only women to save money?

unescape 9y ago
Disagreeable people also tend to get fired more, in my experience. Perhaps it balances out, which would explain why there are still disagreeable people.

to_bpr 9y ago

What is the end goal here? Companies being forced to publish and formalize pay tiers? Can Google publish a report on non-pay differences by sex at Google? Sick (or personal) leave taken, overtime worked, vacation time availed of, etc. by sex? Obviously with everyone being equal and doing equal jobs, the above shouldn't really be an issue?

stale2002 9y ago
The end goal is a meritocracy where women arent discriminated against, and are paid what they are worth. The current situation is not a meritocracy and it needs to be fixed.
- romanovcode 9y ago
  In capitalism you are already payed what you are worth. If you agree for a shit salary that is your problem.
  - stale2002 9y ago
    Actually, if a company is illegally discriminating against people based on gender, then it is THEIR problem. If they do that then they can enjoy their millions of dollars in fines for doing something clearly illegal.
    - romanovcode 9y ago
      Person A asks for 90 dollars per year; Person B asks for 100 dollars per year. Person A does not ask for a rise after one year; Person B asks for 10 dollar rise after one year. TBH I don't see how it is a company fault.
      - stale2002 9y ago
        They are at fault because they are systematically underpaying women of equal qualifications. It does not matter what the "reason" is. It does not matter if the bias is because equally skilled women merely ask for raises less often. If for any reason at all, you are systematically underpaying certain groups that are equally qualified and equally productive, you are legally liable and the onus is on you to fix it.

deleted 9y ago

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Clubber 9y ago

Ladies, please, never take the first offer. My wife did that (she's also a programmer) and she's getting paid shit salary by a shit company to get shit on all day. From Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In "But what's interesting," she says, "was that when my brother-in-law and my husband were saying 'negotiate, negotiate, negotiate' – when I finally said OK I'll do it, because no man would take the first offer, I then thought to myself, I felt like I needed a justification for doing it. And it turns out that's what the data says: men can negotiate without apology or justification. It's expected. If women negotiate, they need to justify it. It can't be that you want more for you. Because that's what men get to do." As she writes in the book, "success and likability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women." https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2013/mar/15/facebook-sheryl-sandberg-lean-in https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2013/mar/15/facebook...

rootlocus 9y ago
On a related note, my company raises salaries yearly as a percentage of the current salary. Even though those with lower salaries get a slightly larger percentage, everyone gets somewhere between 8% to 15%. Having a higher initial offer and asking for a higher raise (and arguing that you earned it) results in better raises. Nobody expects everyone to get the same salary.

snambi 9y ago

Really?

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lumberingjack 9y ago

I still wonder why the gender equality issue in nursing has not been addressed we need more men as nurses! What is it like 12 women to 1 men nurse we have to fix this its is out of hand. /s

tptacek 9y ago
Hahahaha it's funny because "nursing" is a gendered term for a class of front-line medical occupation that is almost certain to be vital to the provisioning of cost-effective health care in the 21st century where it is vitally important that we both raise the status of the profession to get more people into the labor force to do it and also to raise its status among consumers so less people have to wait for ludicrously expensive general practitioner doctors when a qualified nurse-practitioner will do and that's totally what you meant, right? The best joke!
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- broodbucket 9y ago
  Because one of the several definitions of "nursing" is gendered does not mean it is a "gendered term", especially when used in a non-gendered context. Unless I'm immune to the irony, this looks like a ridiculous out of place outburst.
  - ihm 9y ago
    You don't think that people are accustomed to thinking of "nurse" as a female role?
    - broodbucket 9y ago
      Sure but I don't think a mother breastfeeding their child being called "nursing" is the reason
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the_evacuator 9y ago

These ladies are behind the times. Gender politics at Google are now so advanced that feminism isn't even a thing. The "non-binary" and "genderqueer" have thrown the feminists under the bus. Frankly I'm shocked that the informal voluntary salary survey had the bad taste to try to classify gender.

unescape 9y ago

Somebody at Google could write a memo proposing that sexism might not be the only possible explanation of why a majority of their top engineers are male.

bandrami 9y ago

The fun part of these articles is reading all the comments that literally post proximate causes for the gender wage gap and somehow conclude from that that the gap (which they just validated) does not exist. This whole process infuriates me. The gender wage gap is an empirical question. It exists. If we believe it's a problem (I do; you may not), it has the easiest solution in the world: give women more money. Seriously, I just solved the gender pay gap, right there: give women more money. There's all kind of ways you could do that (wage mandates, tax credits, etc.) and they all have pros and cons, but searching for proximate and ultimate causes here is kind of stupid. It exists; if you think it's a problem, the solution is breathtakingly obvious.

great_psy 9y ago
I don't understand how just giving a group of people more money will solve the problem. That's is an artificial way of addressing it, it's just a band aid. Let's look at the causes , and address those. I think that's how you solve it. It is pretty sexist to say , "give someone more money because they are a women"
- bandrami 9y ago
  Ummm... you realize band-aids solve the problem of bleeding, right? Similarly, giving women more money solves the problem of women getting paid less money.
  - solotronics 9y ago
    why isn't everyone paid exactly the same? because that would suck for all of us here and be great for everyone that doesn't work as hard. I was messing with strange *nix distros for years and teaching myself programming before I got a tech job. I would be seriously pissed if someone that didn't know as much got my same job and pay just because they were a _____
    - bandrami 9y ago
      I could understand getting mad if your pay was lowered, but how are you harmed if the other person's pay is increased? We make all sorts of incredibly bizarre (from an outside perspective) decisions about who gets paid what; the fact that we've fooled ourselves into thinking that it's because of supply and demand curves may be comforting but is completely unfounded in any data.

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AlexCoventry 9y ago

I don't know much about civil suits... Is the complaint a matter of public record already? Would be interesting reading.

eksemplar 9y ago

There is an empirically proven wage gap, yet almost every comment to this article is people conjuring up social constructs to explain how that is perfectly fair. It's not fair though, that's the entire point of the inequality in the wage gap. What I do t understand is why people so fiercely defend this wage gap. If women were paid equal to men, we would have lost nothing.

mirimir 9y ago

I gather that Google has pay grades. But are they reviewed in periodic performance reviews? And to what extent is salary synced to that negotiated at hire? I mean, if women (as I've read) generally don't negotiate on salary as hard as men do, are they indefinitely paid proportionately less?

ManlyBread 9y ago

Google has put substantial effort into making the workplace "better" for women (at least in comparison with other companies) and somehow it is still not enough. I can't help but wonder if "enough" even exists - if a company makes an effort to hire the female workforce, promote women programmers and gets rid of anyone who can make women feel uncomfortable then what else still needs to be done? The lawsuit is not even about getting less money for the same amount of work, it's about statistics and averages!

j7ake 9y ago

A purely capitalist solution would be to fire all the men and keep only the women because they are doing comparable work for less pay. In a capitalist market why hasn't this happened already ? This is exactly what happened when much of manufacturing moved away from USA to china, but for some reason this has not happened in the male female salary disparity. A company can earn diversiy points and save money by not hiring expensive male engineers.

romanovcode 9y ago
Someone tried this already, didn't go as well as planned. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1168182/Catfights-handbags-tears-toilets-When-producer-launched-women-TV-company-thought-shed-kissed-goodbye-conflict-.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1168182/Catfights-...
- bb611 9y ago
  At best a story about someone running a company with no idea of how to hire or manage for culture fit, at worst a fiction made to bring in some cash from the daily mail, a publication generally known for their lack of journalistic depth.

mutatedspleen 9y ago

I guarantee they will write a book after all of this. Their story, their raw emotion, the disparity, diversity and oh my the adversity; all beautifully painted on a backdrop of capitalization and autism. Wake me up when it's time. I'll be here, crying.

userpass 9y ago

The solution is obvious. Lock down all computers and only allow computer science students and licensed graduates write code. Don't let those "nerdy" boys use an unfair advantage to get ahead of the others! Downvote as you wish.

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